{"id":650385,"date":"2026-05-18T13:34:22","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T13:34:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/650385\/"},"modified":"2026-05-18T13:34:22","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T13:34:22","slug":"eli-manning-father-didnt-like-the-idea-of-forcing-trade-from-chargers-during-2004-nfl-draft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/650385\/","title":{"rendered":"Eli Manning: Father &#8216;didn&#8217;t like the idea&#8217; of forcing trade from Chargers during 2004 NFL Draft"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Perhaps the Chargers can thank Manning&#8217;s spurning for jump-starting a better commitment to winning. San Diego went to the playoffs in five of the next six seasons after the Manning rejection, and while the Chargers couldn&#8217;t get over the postseason hump, they deployed some excellent teams led by Rivers, Hall of Famers LaDainian Tomlinson and Antonio Gates, Shawne Merriman, etc. After going eight seasons without a postseason bid before 2004, the Chargers, who moved to L.A. in 2017, haven&#8217;t gone more than four campaigns in a row without reaching the playoffs, including back-to-back wild-card berths under Jim Harbaugh.<\/p>\n<p>The discord part of the equation was more or less known as the reason Manning didn&#8217;t want to play in the lovely city of San Diego. A new tidbit Manning relayed was that it was his decision, not his father, Archie, meddling.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;My parents really weren&#8217;t supportive,&#8221; Manning said of his decision to reject the Chargers. &#8220;My dad didn&#8217;t like the idea. He came to my defense and supported me after everything was going down. &#8230; Afterward, he took the brunt of a lot of the criticism. People were saying, &#8216;You played in New Orleans. All those years you didn&#8217;t win. So you are trying to dictate where your son is going.&#8217; He just kind of bit his tongue and said, &#8216;This is what Eli wants to do. I support him.&#8217; He kind of did some media to save me from taking all the hits.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Manning also noted that the Cleveland, who held the No. 7 pick, considered trading for his services, but the QB&#8217;s agent, Tom Condon, nixed that idea as well.<\/p>\n<p>In the end, it all worked out for Manning, who won a pair of Super Bowl MVPs for the Giants.<\/p>\n<p>The new sliver of news from this is that Archie backed his son and never let on for more than two decades that he disagreed with Eli&#8217;s initial decision. That&#8217;s fathering.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Perhaps the Chargers can thank Manning&#8217;s spurning for jump-starting a better commitment to winning. San Diego went to&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":650386,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[6255,6337,977,3,349,6257,215714,99],"class_list":["post-650385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-around-the-nfl","tag-los-angeles-chargers","tag-new-york-giants","tag-news","tag-nfl","tag-no-minute","tag-offseason-news","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=650385"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/650385\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/650386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=650385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=650385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=650385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}